Brianna Ghey WAS killed for being trans: Teenage murderers are jailed for 22 and 20 years but could face even LONGER in prison after judge rules killing was ‘in part’ motivated by transphobia

Brianna Ghey was killed because she was trans, a judge ruled today, as she sentenced the two 16-year-old serial killer obsessives who murdered her to life in prison.

Scarlett Jenkinson and Eddie Ratcliffe were jailed on Friday for a minimum term of 22 years and 20 years respectively, as Jenkinson admitted for the first time that she did stab the teenager and ‘enjoyed planning the murder’. If they are ever released, the killers will remain on licence for life.

Neither showed any emotion as they were told they must serve two decades behind bars, but Jenkinson’s mother began crying in court. It was earlier heard that Jenkinson has written a second ‘kill list’ since being taken into custody – including the names of some of those caring for her.

The body of ‘timid’ Brianna was found lying face-down in the mud with 28 stab wounds after the ‘frenzied’ attack at a popular park near Warrington, Cheshire on February 11 last year. The CPS is now treating the murder as a hate crime – something Cheshire Constabulary ruled out within just 48 hours of its investigation.

Her twisted killers, described as a ‘danger to society’ by their victim’s mother, had planned the attack in great detail, with a handwritten note in Jenkinson’s room reading: ‘Saturday 11th February 2023. Victim: Brianna Ghey’. They then desperately sought to cover their tracks, with Jenkinson posting a Snapchat tribute that called Brianna ‘such an amazing friend’ and ‘one of the best people I’ve ever met’.

The judge concluded that while Jenkinson was motivated by her ‘deep desire’ to kill, Ratcliffe was ‘motivated in part by hostility towards Brianna because she was transgender’. He used ‘dehumanising’ language, repeatedly referring to her as ‘it’ and speculating about whether she would scream ‘like a man or a girl’. In one message, he told Jenkinson he wanted to kill Brianna because he ‘wanted to know what size d*** it had’.

Mrs Justice Yip said that because each killer was aware of the other’s motivations, she considered them both to be partly driven by transphobia.

Cheshire Police previously rejected calls to investigate Brianna’s murder as a hate crime against her due to her transgender identity. The force declined to comment on the matter when contacted after sentencing had been completed.

Jenkinson and Ratcliffe were both 15 when they stabbed Brianna 28 times in Culcheth Linear Park, Cheshire on February 11 last year.

Brianna was hacked to death with appalling savagery, being left with ‘unsurvivable’ injuries including wounds penetrating her heart, both lungs and major blood vessels. 

She had been stabbed to the head, neck, back and chest with enough force to damage the bones of her ribs, vertebrae and sternum. Her jugular vein had also been severed, causing ‘catastrophic blood loss’. 

The pair were still only 16 when they stood trial at Manchester Crown Court last November, meaning neither their names nor the schools they had attended could be published. They blamed one another for the brutal killing, but shortly before Christmas jurors took less than five hours to unanimously convict them both.

Speaking outside Manchester Crown court following the sentencing, Senior Crown Prosecutor Nicola Wyn Williams said Brianna’s killing is considered a hate crime.

She said the CPS applied to the judge for an increase in the killers’ sentences as it believed the ‘killing was a hate crime, motivated in part by hostility towards Brianna because she was transgender’.

‘We are pleased that the court has agreed that this was a motive,’ she added.

On Friday Brianna’s mother Esther Ghey was pictured smiling as she left court, which she attended alongside friends, family and Brianna’s father Pete Spooner. 

Inside the packed courtroom, Mrs Justice Yip formally stripped Jenkinson and Ratcliffe of their anonymity as she said there was a ‘significant degree of planning and pre-meditation’ to the crime.

The court was told Jenkinson has finally admitted she stabbed Brianna multiple times. The heartless teenager was seen drawing pictures in the dock while she waited for the judge to return and inform her of her fate. 

Mrs Justice Yip said Jenkinson had ‘enjoyed’ killing Brianna – who would ‘not have lost consciousness immediately and she must have know she was being attacked’.

She said messages sent by Jenkinson showed she ‘wanted to make a real victim feel pain and fear’. 

She continued: ‘Scarlett, your motivation was to act out your fantasies. Brianna’s injuries showed she was killed with exceptional brutality. This was a murder involved sadistic conduct.

‘You both took part in a brutal and planned murder which was sadistic in nature and a secondary motivation was hostility to Brianna because of her transgender identity.’

She told Jenkinson: ‘You Scarlett introduced the idea of killing people. At first this was fantasy but it developed into something real. By January 2023 you had a real desire to kill somebody.’

She said the teenager ‘knew [Brianna] was vulnerable and needed friendship and you abused that.’

She added: ‘Two days before the murder you said you were excited. Afterwards you sent messages to people drawing attention to the murder. She was killed with exceptional brutality, the knife was used to inflict far more damage than was necessary to cause death.’

She concluded Jenkinson was an ‘unreliable witness’, adding: ‘It is simply impossible to believe any account Scarlett gives.’

Turning to Ratcliffe, the judge continued: ‘It would be wholly wrong to treat you as being under Scarlett’s control. But I acknowledge that you were not the driving force behind the plan to kill Brianna, Scarlett was.’

She added he was motivated ‘in part’ by a ‘hostility’ towards trans people, and was happy to ‘go along’ with and ‘encourage’ Jenkinson’s plans when he had ‘nothing better to do’.

‘Your messages about Brianna were transphobic,’ she told him. ‘You consistently referred to her in a way that was dehumanising, calling her “it”. You also described her as a “femboy thing”.’

She told the court the sentences she had passed were ‘significantly’ shorter than if the pair had been adults, and that the 352 days they had spent on remand would be deducted. 

‘Brianna was only 16 when she was killed. She had her whole life ahead of her,’ Mrs Justice Yip said. ‘Even though her life was so short she made an impact. Her family remember her for her laughter, for being full of life and for being a good listener. Their loss is unimaginable.’

She told the teenagers: ‘You will only be released if in the future it is decided that you no longer present a danger.’ She added this means the pair may never be released.

Describing how she had come to her decision, the judge said: ‘I sentence you on the basis that both of you played a full part in killing Brianna and both intended she would die.’

Ratcliffe’s mother, sat in court, did not react as her son was sentenced, but Jenkinson’s mother burst into tears. 

Jenkinson made no reaction as she was told she must serve more than two decades behind bars. She sat blinking occasionally as she was addressed by the judge and briefly asked a question of her intermediary, or approved adult, sat beside her in the dock. 

Ratcliffe, also seated and looking directly in front of him, made no visible reaction as he was sentenced. He was led down to the cells without looking over at his mother, who was sat to the left of the dock. 

It was revealed today that for the first time Jenkinson has admitted stabbing Brianna ‘a number of times’, having previously blamed all of the blows on her fellow killer Ratcliffe. 

The court heard she told a forensic psychiatrist that she took the knife from him and stabbed Brianna repeatedly. She also admitted to giving Ratcliffe the ‘instruction’ to bring his hunting knife.

Jenkinson – who was obsessed with serial killers and their methods – planned to take ‘part of her flesh’ as a ‘token’, prosecutor Deanna Heer KC said.

She continued: ‘[Jenkinson]said Eddie had thrown Brianna to the floor and stabbed her three or four times then he panicked and said he did not want to kill her, so she carried on and stabbed her a number of times.

‘When asked how many, she answered, ‘A lot.’ She was satisfied and excited by what she was doing.’

Jenkinson told consultant Dr Richard Church that while Ratcliffe ‘didn’t like Brianna because she was trans’, her motivation was ‘quite different’, the court heard.

‘She had enjoyed thinking about the plan to kill Brianna, but her motivation for doing so was that she considered Brianna a friend and anticipated that Brianna was going to leave her and that she wanted to kill her so that she would always be with her,’ Mrs Heer added.

Meanwhile Ratcliffe has stuck to the version of events he gave in court, in which he said Jenkinson had inflicted all the stab wounds to Brianna while he was ‘urinating against a tree’. 

Jenkinson has written another ‘kill list’ since being locked up at a secure unit following the murder, the court heard, naming some of the people responsible for caring for her.

Experts have concluded that she does not – as previously diagnosed – suffer from ADHD or autism, but instead a form of ‘conduct dissocial disorder’. This was all evidence that ‘she knew that what she was doing was wrong’, Mrs Heer said.

The condition entails ‘limited pro-social emotions’ and represents ‘impending’ antisocial behaviour disorder, but does not constitute a mental illness, she said. Ratcliffe’s diagnosis with a ‘mild’ form of autism – made ahead of the trial – still stands, the prosecutor added.

Ahead of the judge Mrs Justice Yip deciding what minimum term the killers should spend behind bars, prosecutor Mrs Heer said she would need to consider whether the murder was motivated by ‘sadism’ and ‘hostility’ at Brianna’s transgender status in determining how many years they must serve.

She highlighted how Ratcliffe – who had never met Brianna before – used ‘disparaging’ language in his messages with Jenkinson, referring to her as ‘it’.

While Jenkinson did not use transphobic language, she said it was the prosecution case that she ‘encouraged’ Ratcliffe to kill Brianna in the knowledge that his ‘attitude’ would make it more likely that he would go ahead and stab her.

She admitted in messages to being ‘obsessed’ with Brianna and told a psychiatrist she had wanted to kill her so they would ‘always be together’.

The judge said there was ‘evidence’ of sadism and transphobia but the issue was whether this was strong enough to lead to an even longer sentence.

It means that following extensive research and interviews with some of those who knew them best, as well as leading criminologists, MailOnline can reveal that:

• Scarlett Jenkinson was raised in a loving, supportive home by her mother, who taught home economics and design technology at a Catholic secondary school, and plasterer father. 
• By the time she was 12 it was ‘common knowledge’ at Culcheth High School that she had a ‘kill list’ of children who had taken a dislike to, trying to recruit other pupils to take part in ‘blood rituals’.
• Jenkinson was expelled from the school – in the village where they would murder Brianna just weeks later – for trying to ‘poison’ a fellow pupil with cannabis sweets in October 2022.
• She was moved to Birchwood High School and placed in the ‘inclusion unit’ where Brianna was taught because of her struggles with anxiety, becoming ‘obsessed’ with her by December 2022.
• An independent child safeguarding review into Brianna’s murder is examining Jenkinson’s interaction with key agencies, including the police, social services and schools. 
• Eddie Ratcliffe was a top set student at Culcheth High School and treated as a ‘role model’ at the time of the murder, preparing to sit nine GCSEs and aspiring to go to university to study microbiology. 
• His mother is an award-winning graphic designer who created a mural for the NHS celebrating organ donation before launching herself as a wellness guru. 
• Jenkinson picked the location for the killing as she regularly walked the family’s pet dog in the park, just a few minutes from their house – Ratcliffe had never been there before. 
• By accessing the ‘dark web’ through her phone to search for images of real-life killings and torture, Jenkinson became desensitised murder and probably ‘damaged her psyche’, experts have told the Mail. 
• Social media also propelled and accelerated the killers’ fantasies, leading to the brutal murder of Brianna in a relatively short period of time – just a few weeks after she came on their radar, they said.
• According to a leading criminologist, the killers’ relationship was a classic ‘folie a deux’ – a shared madness or delusion typically found in couples who kill – comparable to Moor Murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley , but unusually with them not being girlfriend and boyfriend. 

In a victim impact statement read to the court, Brianna’s mother said the ‘hardest’ thing about her daughter’s ordeal was finding out that one of her killers, Jenkinson, was ‘someone we believed to be her friend’.

She described Jenkinson as: ‘Someone that we trusted. Someone that I was so happy that [Brianna] had, fearing that my child had been lonely. Not knowing that this person had been planning, to not only cause harm, but to take the life of my precious child.’

She continued: ‘All I can think about is that she would have been scared and I wasn’t there for her. She needed me to protect her, Brianna wasn’t a fighter and she must have been so terrified.

‘The day of and the days following 11th of February were and always will be the worst days of my life. I felt like someone had killed part of me, like my heart had been ripped out. I have never felt such grief and I would never wish that pain on anyone else.’

Esther Ghey also told the court Brianna had ‘plans for her future’ she will never be able to fulfill: ‘The fact that Brianna was taken from me in such a heinous way causes a pain that I struggle to describe. No parent should ever have to bury their child. She should have been around for the rest of my life. 

‘Brianna had plans for her future which we will never have the chance to support her with. She wanted to go to college and study beauty therapy; she was looking forward to being old enough to have a little job like her big sister. We had also discussed her learning to drive, and she had even picked out which pink car she would like for her 18th birthday.’ 

She described Jenkinson and Ratcliffe as a ‘danger to society’, adding: ‘The thought of Scarlett and Eddie being released from prison absolutely horrifies me. I don’t believe that someone who is so disturbed and obsessed with murder and torture would ever be able to be rehabilitated.’

Brianna’s father Peter Spooner added: ‘Being a father of a transgender child was a difficult thing to deal with. Without people accusing me of dead naming my child, most of my memories are with my son Brett. Our memories are engraved on my heart. He was funny, cheeky and would pull faces to make me laugh. He was my baby, my only Son and his decision to transition was such a brave and confident thing to do.

‘Even though I grieved the son I lost, I was proud to gain another beautiful daughter. Her appearance changed as she blossomed into a lovely young girl, her eyes were the same, she had my eyes when I looked at her. We were forming a new relationship and these two murderers have stolen that from us both.

‘I hate how Brianna’s life has been brutally taken away from her and she has been deprived of the life she wanted to live. She never had the chance to sit her exams or go onto further education.

‘Now my world has been torn apart, justice may have been done with the guilty verdicts, but no amount of time spent in prison will be enough for these monsters.

‘I cannot call them children as that makes them sound naïve or vulnerable which they are not, they are pure evil, Brianna was the vulnerable one.

‘They were determined to kill and never gave up until they had blood on their hands, my Brianna’s blood.

‘Not an ounce of remorse has been shown from these murderers, putting myself and my family through this awful trial having to hear the details about how Brianna suffered. It is unforgivable.’

In a statement read to the court, Brianna’s stepfather Wesley Powell said: ‘Brianna had a large online following but in reality she was lonely, vulnerable and in need of a close friend.

‘Both Eddie and Scarlett knew this and preyed upon her vulnerabilities, acting as two predators stalking their prey.’

After the victim personal statements were read to the court, Mrs Justice Yip ordered a short break as she said: ‘They were very moving statements. I can feel the emotion in the courtroom.’

At court on Friday Jenkinson’s barrister, Richard Pratt KC, said the teenager now maintains – contrary to what she has told experts – that Ratcliffe was responsible for all the stab wounds.

She said she had confessed due to feeling ‘responsible’ for Brianna’s death, he said in mitigation. But she still accepted her ‘gruesome’ intentions for what she intended to do to her body but for a dog walker stumbling across the murder scene, he added.

Mr Pratt said that he was ‘bound’ to say he had ‘reservations’ about the latest change in her account.

Putting it more bluntly, Mrs Justice Yip commented that ‘quite frankly it’s impossible to believe anything she says’. She said it appeared that in making her confession, having been convicted, Jenkinson ‘wanted to paint herself in as bad a light as possible’.

The judge said that the details of her confession – in which she spoke of wanting to take a piece of Brianna’s flesh as a ‘token’ – would seem ‘completely extraordinary’ were in not for the evidence of her ‘admiration of notorious killers’.

Mr Pratt also said he acknowledged there appeared to be a substantial element of pre-meditation in the murder of Brianna Ghey.

He added Jenkinson had been diagnosed with an eating disorder and a dissocial disorder – a type of personality disorder which he said was ‘significant mitigation’.

He said no-one familiar with the murder could have avoided coming to the conclusion that ‘there must have been something wrong with her’.

The diagnosis – of conduct dissocial disorder with limited pro-social emotion – meant the tragic consequences of her actions could not be ‘fully laid at her door’, her barrister added.

When someone does not have empathy, ‘you don’t have the brake to stop behaviours that harm others because they feel wrong’, he said.

Had this diagnosis been made before the trial, he would have considered whether it amounted to a defence of diminished responsibility, Mr Pratt said.

On behalf of Ratcliffe, Richard Littler KC insisted that Jenkinson’s extensive planning placed her responsibility for the murder in ‘a completely different category’ to his client.

Addressing whether Ratcliffe was motivated by hostility to Brianna’s transgender status, he said the cruel messages he wrote about her should be seen as ‘offensive comments made by an autistic adolescent’.

Mr Littler argued that the fact Brianna was transgender should be ‘immaterial’ to the sentence he receives, saying he would have assisted Jenkinson ‘irrespective’ of whether the target was a boy or a girl.

Reading from the expert report on Jenkinson, he said the new ‘kill list’ written since her incarceration names two or three members of staff at the secure unit. By contrast, the report found Jenkinson said she felt ‘sexually excited’ at killing Brianna and this feeling ‘made her stab more times’.

He said Jenkinson told the psychiatrist that she had meant to hide Brianna’s body in a large pipe at the park.

Mr Littler added that an expert report likened elements of Ratcliffe’s functioning to that of a child of seven or eight. His autism made it harder for him to understand what others might be thinking, or what they planned to do.

The pair’s trial, which concluded days before Christmas, left the nation struggling to comprehend how two children from supportive, stable family backgrounds could have plotted and carried out the ‘savage’ and ‘vile’ killing.

After the trial judge allowed the media to name the ‘warped’ pair, it can now be revealed for the first time that Jenkinson met their ‘trusting’ victim when she was moved to the ‘inclusion unit’ for troubled children which Brianna attended. 

The decision to place them together – which came after Jenkinson was excluded from her school for passing drugs to fellow pupils, leaving one in hospital – happened just weeks before Brianna’s murder.

It is now the subject of an independent safeguarding review into whether local agencies could have done more to protect her.

Jenkinson had become fascinated by serial killers including Harold Shipman and Californian ‘Night Stalker’ Richard Ramirez, filling pages of notebooks with jottings about their methods and characters.

Along with Ratcliffe, who was highly-intelligent but socially awkward, she drew up a ‘kill list’ of five potential targets before settling on slightly-built Brianna – who considered her a friend.

While in real life, Brianna suffered from anxiety, didn’t like to go out on her own and only had a small circle of friends, in the virtual world she was on the way to becoming a social media star. 

Her TikTok videos showing her styling her hair or lip-synching to pop songs had earned her 30,000 followers, many of them fellow transgender teenagers who saw her as an inspiration.

According to her mother, Brianna was ‘larger than life’, ‘funny and witty’ and ‘usually fearless’. 

Brianna’s headteacher described her as ‘iconic’, adding: ‘She was such a huge character in school. Everyone knew who she was and losing her has hit everybody so hard.’

Her brutal and apparently inexplicable killing – on a Saturday afternoon, in a former railway cutting popular with dog walkers – caused waves of outrage and revulsion far beyond her home town of Warrington.

Prosecutors argued Ratcliffe and Jenkinson were ‘in it together’ from start to finish, right from planning the attack to attempting to cover their tracks afterwards.

In the days that followed, a string of vigils were held across the globe for people to come together and express their grief.

Cheshire Police faced public pressure to treat Brianna’s brutal killing as a hate crime. But within 24 hours, detectives had been told about Jenkinson, a local girl who Brianna regarded as a good friend.

Ratcliffe’s arrest soon followed as both had been seen with her in the village of Culcheth that afternoon. Both intelligent and ‘high functioning’, her killers – neither of whom had been in trouble with police before – secretly shared a fascination for violence, torture and murder. 

Messages recovered from Jenkinson’s phone revealed she and Ratcliffe had drawn up a ‘kill list’ naming five teenagers they wanted to murder over the preceding weeks.

While Jenkinson was ‘obsessed’ with Brianna, Ratcliffe had never met her before the day of the murder.

His messages were littered with cruel references to Brianna as ‘it’ and dehumanising language.

After a teenage boy they wanted to kill ‘smelt a rat’, the WhatsApp chats showed how they turned their attention to Brianna.

Ratcliffe sent a message to Jenkinson saying ‘yeah, it’ll be easier and I want to see if it will scream like a man or a girl’.

Their trial was told it was ‘difficult to fathom’ how two children could carry out such a disturbing crime. After being caught, the killers blamed each other.

But the prosecution successfully argued it was a case of joint enterprise. 

Their planning and botched efforts to cover their tracks meant both were guilty of murder, regardless of whether one or both wielded the knife, they told jurors.

Senior Crown Prosecutor Nicola Wyn Williams of CPS Mersey Cheshire’s Complex Casework Unit, said on Friday: ‘This sentencing hearing concludes one of the most disturbing cases that the Crown Prosecution Service has had to deal with.

‘At just 16, Scarlett Jenkinson and Eddie Ratcliffe are convicted killers, responsible for the brutal murder of a vulnerable young girl who thought they were her friends. They have been given a life term of imprisonment and have shown no remorse.

‘The planning, violence and the age of the killers is beyond belief. The two appear to have had a deadly influence on each other and turned what may have started out as dark fantasies about murder into a reality.

‘The messages between the two provided a terrifying insight into the warped desires and fantasies of the two defendants. However, they also provided us with the motivation behind the attack, the plans and then the attempts to cover it up.

‘Today’s sentence reflects the brutality of the two killers’ heartless crime – and while it cannot erase the pain of Brianna’s loss, we hope it brings some closure.

‘The Crown Prosecution Service would again like to thank Brianna’s family for the courage and dignity they have shown throughout the proceedings and our thoughts and sympathies remain with them at this difficult time.’

Following the sentencing, DI Nige Parr said: ‘This has been a challenging and complex investigation from the very beginning and while I am pleased that the two responsible for Brianna’s brutal and senseless murder have been handed significant sentences, there is no escaping the tragedy in this case.

‘Thankfully, Brianna’s family will finally see those responsible for her murder being punished for their part in this shocking crime.

‘Jenkinson and Ratcliffe have shown absolutely no remorse for the pain they have caused, refusing to admit responsibility for their actions and selfishly subjected Brianna’s family, and their own families, to the ordeal of a trial.

‘I would like to express my sincere condolences to Brianna’s family. They have shown an immense amount of courage and dignity throughout the investigation and the trial, and this has been an incredibly difficult experience for them. I hope that they can now in some way start to rebuild their lives after going through so much pain and grief.’

After they were found guilty, Brianna’s mother Esther spoke of the terror Brianna would have felt when they turned on her out of the blue.

‘To now know how scared my usually fearless child must have been when she was alone in the park with someone that she called her friend will haunt me forever,’ the 37-year-old food technologist said.

Ms Ghey, who selflessly responded to Brianna’s brutal murder by launching a campaign in her daughter’s name to teach empathy and compassion in schools, said there had been moments when she ‘felt sorry’ for her killers who had ‘ruined their own lives as well as ours’.

‘But now knowing the true nature of the two and seeing neither display an ounce of remorse for what they have done to Brianna, I have lost any sympathy that I previously had for them, and I am glad that they will spend many years in prison and away from society,’ she added.

Outside court Brianna’s father, Peter Spooner, 42, who is separated from Ms Ghey, said: ‘I hate how her life has been brutally taken away from her and she has been deprived of the life she wanted to live.

‘It’s difficult to comprehend how some people can do these vile things in the world and don’t understand how cruel and heartbreaking their actions can be.

‘The suffering from this horrific incident should never happen and I hope no other family ever experiences the torture this can bring.’

Following their conviction in December, Detective Superintendent Mike Evans, head of Cheshire CID, branded the murderous pair ‘two very warped individuals’ who had demonstrated ‘a thirst for killing’.

He added that there were ‘not many murders where you get from plan to execution almost documented word for word’.

Asked whether he believed they could have claimed more victims had they not been caught so quickly, Det Supt Evans replied: ‘They did not seem particularly bothered by what they had done which maybe leads to the fact that there could have been, but God knows.’

‘As to who did what, I am not sure we will ever know,’ Det Supt Evans said afterwards.

He said Brianna was targeted due to her ‘trusting’ nature rather than out of ‘hatred or ill-feeling’. 

‘If it was not Brianna, it would have been one of the other four children on the list.’

A crumpled handwritten note was found in Jenkinson’s bedroom headed ‘Saturday 11th February 2023. Victim: Brianna Ghey’.

In the damning murder plan – an image of which she had sent Ratcliffe – she had written: ‘He stabs her in the back as I stab her in the stomach.’

The prosecution claimed that the ferocity of the wounds – inflicted using a 5in hunting knife which the trial heard Ratcliffe’s parents bought him during a skiing trip the previous month – and their locations suggested Ratcliffe had done exactly that.

A separate wound in Brianna’s stomach area could have been inflicted by Jenkinson as she lay dying, Deanna Heer KC claimed.

But following their convictions, Det Supt Evans said: ‘As to who did what, I am not sure we will ever know.’ 

The killers’ messages led investigators to believe plot was not driven primarily by a hatred of Brianna’s transgender identity. 

As to why they targeted her, the senior detective said he believed it was down to how her ‘trusting’ nature made her particularly ‘vulnerable’ to the pair’s plotting.

‘I don’t think this was a case of hatred or ill-feeling,’ he said.

‘If it was not Brianna, it would have been one of the other four children on the list.

‘It is just Brianna was the one who was accessible at that time and because the focus of those desires.’

Acknowledging that Ratcliffe used ‘dehumanising and transphobic’ language, he highlighted how by contrast Jenkinson was ‘admiring and almost obsessed with Brianna’.

As a result, he sticks by his belief that ‘Brianna was not killed because she was transgender’.

Questioned whether they killed her ‘for fun’, Det Supt Evans replied: ‘They killed because they wanted to prove that they could and they had a thirst for killing.

‘Maybe enjoyment is the right word.’

But the ‘really intelligent and quite high functioning’ pair exhibited an ‘arrogance’ that ‘they would not get caught’, Det Supt added.

He slammed the killers’ ‘cowardice’ in subjecting Brianna’s family to a trial in which her terrifying final moments had to be picked over when there was ‘significant evidence’ against them.

Ursula Doyle, deputy chief prosecutor for Merseyside and Cheshire CPS, said the messages the pair exchanged had made ‘difficult reading’ and branded the plot to kill Brianna ‘absolutely shocking’.

‘Often messages need to be interpreted to find out what they mean, but these did not need to be interpreted, they were explicit and that is unusual,’ she said.

‘Their planning, the messages, the way they tried to cover up their offending all showed an arrogance.’

The trial heard Brianna had been bullied at Birchwood Community High School.

But her headteacher, Emma Mills, has said there was ‘never any evidence’ of this, either in or out of school.

‘Brianna was very much able to give as good as she got in that way,’ she told the BBC.

‘And I think what was really hard was that she was portrayed in the media as a victim and she didn’t live her life as a victim.’